We Tested Claude 4, GPT-4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro & Grok 3 – What's the ...
The AI race is heating up like never before. As of May 2025, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI have all dropped their newest flagship models—ChatGPT (GPT-4.5/4.1), Claude 4 (Claude 3.7 Sonnet), Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3. Each one promises major leaps in intelligence, creativity, reasoning, and tool use—and this time, the hype isn’t just marketing. These models are genuinely more useful, more capable, and in many cases, shockingly good.
Which AI Model is the Best?
The question of which AI model is the best depends on what you’re looking for. Some excel at coding or technical tasks, others are better at conversation, real-time knowledge, or working with huge documents. What’s clear is that we’re finally at a point where AI isn’t just a novelty—it’s something people can lean on every day for real work, research, or creative help.
General Knowledge and Conversational Skills
One of the most important tasks for any AI model is answering questions accurately and holding a natural, helpful conversation. We compared the top models using the MMLU benchmark (which tests knowledge across 57 subjects) and real-world conversational experience.
Winner: ChatGPT (GPT-4.5 / o3) - ChatGPT holds a narrow lead in general knowledge and natural conversation. Its latest model, GPT-4.5 (often referred to as GPT-4.1 or part of the “o-series”), scored ~90.2% on MMLU, outperforming both Claude 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, which sit in the 85–86% range. That translates into more accurate, confident answers across domains like history, law, science, and social studies.
Runner-Up: Gemini 2.5 Pro - Gemini matches GPT-4.5 closely in coherence and logic. It scored ~85.8% on MMLU, but it often shines in reasoning-heavy or scientific prompts thanks to native chain-of-thought processing.
Claude 4 (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) - Claude delivers friendly, detailed responses with excellent contextual memory. Its 85–86% MMLU score puts it on par with Gemini, but it stands out with a massive 200K token context window, ideal for document analysis.
Coding and Programming Abilities
As large language models become more integrated into developer workflows, their ability to write, edit, and understand code is a major differentiator. Whether it’s generating new functions, debugging existing code, or explaining complex logic, the top AI models in 2025 are competing to become your go-to programming assistant.
Winner: Claude 4 (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) - Claude currently leads in code generation accuracy, hitting 62–70% on SWE-Bench, a benchmark simulating real-world programming tasks.
Runner-Up: Gemini 2.5 Pro - Gemini excels at code editing, scoring 73% on the Aider benchmark. It’s also impressive in end-to-end coding workflows, particularly when multimodal inputs are involved.
Mathematics and Logical Reasoning
Solving math problems and multi-step logical tasks is a true test of reasoning. These challenges go beyond memorized facts—they require the model to break down steps, hold logic chains, and calculate accurately.
Winner: Gemini 2.5 Pro - Gemini stands out with 86.7% on AIME 2025, solving problems without any external tools. On MathArena, it scored 24.4%, while all others failed to break even 5%.
Runner-Up: ChatGPT GPT-4.5 o3 (with tools) - With tool use, GPT-4.5’s o3 model dominates—scoring 98–99% on AIME. It’s superhuman with a calculator.
Contextual Understanding
When working with long texts, like academic papers or full books, an AI's context window becomes critical. It defines how much information the model can “see” at once.
Winner: Gemini 2.5 Pro - Gemini leads with a jaw-dropping 1 million token context window—far beyond anything else available today.
Runner-Up: Claude 4 (Claude 3.7) - Claude offers a still-impressive 200K token context, perfect for single-document analysis or large code projects.
Multimodal Capabilities
Multimodal models can process and understand more than just text—images, audio, video, and combinations of these. This unlocks huge value for creatives, researchers, educators, and developers working with real-world data.
Winner: Gemini 2.5 Pro - Gemini is the only model in this comparison that handles all major modalities natively—text, images, audio, and video.
Runner-Up: Claude 4 & GPT-4.5 (tie) - Both models accept text + image inputs, allowing users to upload screenshots, photos, or scanned documents.
Grok 3 - Grok supports image generation, which the others handle via external tools. However, it doesn’t yet process multimodal inputs.
Winner: Claude 4 (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) - Claude 4 stands out for its tone, style, and creativity in writing tasks.
